Popular Comic Site Drawcrowd Bans Adult Content

The online communities of illustrators are vast, with work ranging from cute comics to gory monsters to XXX-rated hentai content. However, options for sharing, consuming, and making money off of adult-themed content just got a little bit smaller, as artists on the popular networking and art-sharing site Drawcrowd were just informed that NSFW content is no longer welcome on the platform.

The email states that Drawcrowd has been working on improving the site and as part of those improvements, they’ve partnered with “several payment method providers around the globe” in order to provide members with “more ways to support their favorite Creators on Drawcrowd.” Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean adult-themed creators — those folks are out of luck.

“Unfortunately, most, if not all, of these payment method providers have stringent policies regarding explicit content. In order to comply, we are updating our usage policy to adhere to these standards. Starting today, any artwork you upload on Drawcrowd must not be explictly [sic] pornographic in nature. In addition to that, we also ask that you not upload artwork that includes depicitions [sic] of male and/or female genitialia [sic] as well as nipples.”

Drawcrowd users have taken to Twitter to express their dislike of the new policy. One user, with the username Cetui, points out that nudity is banned — but as usual, violence is okay. This is pretty standard for “ethics” clauses from payment providers, which often ban and nude depiction of the human body but have no such qualms with depictions of the human body being violently destroyed.

One adult content comic artist, Hizzacked, tells MiKandi that she wasn’t a part of the Drawcrowd community because she feared that something like this would happen.

“I was banned from Art Station for posting hentai — even though I never posted hentai there — and directed to Drawcrowd for that sort of thing because I guess it was allowed,” Hizzacked says. “I only saw a small handful of adult pics ever on Drawcrowd, and I was too paranoid to post mine, because this always happens.”

“This always happens” is a familiar, tired refrain for adult content creators. Despite the glimmer of light last August when Patreon — a site that helps artists raise money to support their work — got PayPal-owned Braintree to allow them to accept money for adult content, stories like this one from Drawcrowd are much more common. It goes like this: Community submits adult content, community grows, admins and owners look for new payment systems, payment systems have morality clauses or claim adult content is “high risk,” adult content creators get kicked out of community.

Sigh.

However, here at MiKandi, we’ll never allow sex negative “ethics” clauses to determine what content is released and shared on our platform. This company was founded with the belief that adults should be allowed to be adults and that’s a belief we hold dear. So if you’re an adult content creator and you want a platform to share your work, check out our guidelines for submitting. There’s a lot there but you’ll notice one thing that’s definitely not: Sex negative bullshit.

Emma McGowan writes about technology and, on hotter days, sex and tech. She’s an expert on dating and hook-up apps, the latest in sex toy technology, and how rapidly changing technologies affect our rapidly changing social mores. Check out her full professional profile at http://emmamcgowan.me/ or read more sex/tech writing on http://kinkandcode.com/. You can follow her (and pitch story ideas!) on Twitter @MissEmmaMcG.